Segment Releases Personas, Allowing Companies to Intelligently Organize, Synthesize and Act on Their First-Party Data

Built on Segment’s Customer Data Infrastructure, Personas Helps Businesses Improve Customer Engagement Without Relying on Third-Party Data


SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Segment, the customer data platform, today announced the general availability of Personas, a new product which helps businesses intelligently organize, synthesize and act on their customer data. With Personas, companies can effectively leverage Segment’s first-party customer data infrastructure to provide a consistent user experience across email, web, advertising, push notifications, in-store and more, while also being respectful of customer privacy.

Previously, leveraging first-party customer data for consistent personalization across all channels was a massive data and infrastructure problem. Customers expect businesses to remember who they are based on their past interactions — whether through a mobile app, website, emails, ads, push notifications, live chats, in-store, or the support and sales team. Each conversation with customers should incorporate context from their past interactions, no matter where those occurred. This requires an infrastructure that allows companies to leverage and activate their customer data across all channels.

Personas Improves Customer Engagement and Supports Team Efficiency

Built on Segment’s customer data infrastructure, Personas automatically organizes a customer’s history with a business into a central record that updates in real-time. With this unified profile, marketing, product and support teams can easily understand and act on what’s important to each customer.

Using Personas, businesses are able to:

  • Improve user acquisition by dynamically targeting high-value prospects. Automatically update advertising audience segments based on the traits of their best customers, and then programmatically refresh advertising campaigns targeting lookalike audiences while excluding current customers. For Consulting.com, an online education platform for entrepreneurs, this ability has allowed the company to increase the ROI of its advertising spend by 10 percent.

  • Keep messages in-sync across marketing channels. Deliver a consistent message regardless of channel and through every step of the funnel, tailored to each user’s specific interactions. Frame.io, a post-production video collaboration software platform, improved marketing campaign performance across email, push notifications and chat by over 50 percent.

  • Experiment faster with new audiences and simplified work streams. Build traits and audiences from first-party data and activate them in downstream tools immediately. Cloud platform provider DigitalOcean reduced cost-per-conversion by 33 percent and built these audience segments 5x faster with Personas.
     
  • Streamline support and increase ticket resolution speeds. Combine user history across devices and channels into searchable profiles for service teams. Frame.io has decreased the time-to-resolution for complex support tickets by up to 80 percent.

"Personas gives us the clear and complete understanding of our customers that we need to improve our marketing and support initiatives and interact with them in the ways they appreciate most," said Kyle Gesuelli, head of growth at Frame.io. "With Personas, we've been able to cut our marketing campaign coordination time by 50 percent and improve performance by 50 percent. We’ve also reduced handling time for complex support tickets by up to 80 percent. These kind of metrics would be impossible without Personas.”

A Unified View of the Customer

Segment Personas enables companies to cut through the noise and treat customers like people, not data points. There are three key pillars of Personas:

  1. Identity Resolution: Accurately merge a user’s history across different channels into one profile using the Segment Identity Graph.
  2. Trait and Audience Building: Build Computed Traits and Audiences with an easy drag-and-drop interface on top of historical first-party data.
  3. Activation: Deliver Computed Traits and Audiences to hundreds of end tools for personalized marketing campaigns and in-app experiences.

“The most inspiring companies put their customers first. In order to deliver personal experiences without sacrificing customer privacy, companies must build the right infrastructure. But few have the engineering resources required to do this,” said Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Segment. “Personas allows businesses to leverage Segment’s simple and scalable first-party customer data infrastructure to deliver the experience each of their customers want at scale, while being respectful of their privacy.”

Visit https://segment.com/personas to get started today.

About Segment
Segment is the infrastructure for your customer data. Use one API to unlock 200+ tools for every team in your company. With Segment, developers can stop building tedious and expensive one-off data integrations while business users can compute important traits about each customer and push this data to their favorite apps for analytics and personalization. Segment is trusted by thousands of companies including Gap Inc., New Relic, Instacart, Intuit, and Time. For more information visit https://segment.com.

Danielle Stickler
dstickler@bateman-group.com